12 comments:

Reviewing this and the Stevens poem has made for a rewarding, if unsettling, Sunday. The upper image of the cargo containers, especially, is something I will never forget. It brought to mind something no more than half-remembered about God, the universe and game of pick-up sticks. I don't remember the language exactly, but I'm sure you catch my drift. They always say that it's a matter of scale. They're not always right about that, but scale as shown in these photographs is scarring.

Yes completely scaring... "desasosiego" is the word that came to my mind (something like unease and anxiety). How to put order in all this mess? Where to begin? That's exactly how my nightmares are.Really terrible.And yet your post exhales beauty...

I've been haunted by that container image too, even as the daily footage has become steadily more terrible and awe-inspiring. Scaring and scarring indeed.

"The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other." Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

Astonishment and horror indeed, as we attempt to play out the routines of our daily lives; with the growing sense of the merely personal being suddenly, curiously dwarfed by history --

"...and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other."

Tom – still working this out (which makes it sound like some time soon I expect to crack it, but you know what I mean) – there’s something here for me about how the original catastrophe – an experience of the natural sublime – has exposed, suddenly, catastrophically, the sublime nature of our relationship to the second nature of the global techno-industrial-commercial system. That we experience that ‘nature’ too as a Thing of inconceivable complexity and scale, dwarfing and terrorising the ‘merely personal’ and freezing our ability to think (to think that system ‘otherwise’).

Which might help explain the strange pleasure I’ve felt in viewing the container image: that for a moment it brackets off the appalling human costs and shows the still superior power of the first nature over the things and mechanisms of the second. That the inconceivable inter-knitted 'sublime' strength of that second nature can be imagined as broken, even if momentarily – ‘a matter of scale and perspective’.

Thank you Tom - I'm ashamed to say I didn't know either Gursky or Kurtynsky's work, but this is a great introduction. Feels like the Kurtynsky oilfield/pipeline one plugs pretty directly into what I was fumbling to say - those straight silver sections cutting through the green.

And great to be taken back to Watt as well - in this context I couldn't help reading it as an allegory of the infinite pointless permutations of consumer 'choice'. Maybe getting a little carried away here ...

I appreciate you mentioning your father and his job in paper. My dad's last job was as a training officer in the paper industry, until the Thatcher government decided that a statutory requirement to train employees and bring in new personnel through apprenticeship schemes was an intolerable bureaucratic burden on our entrepreneurs, and axed all the national Training Boards. Last week David Cameron declared heroically to the Confederation of British Industry that he would battle 'the enemies of enterprise'. Today dad was to be heard revolving in his grave as the latest dire figures on UK youth unemployment wafted heavenwards. Same show, new cast, it seems.

as a person who worked as aninsurance executive... in a addition to being a poet, Stevenswas certainly capable of capitalistic actuarial assessmentsie bean counter for money...at KeyWest I've always found that asense of order beyond the naturalis left behind, escaping the poetwas, from his day job,now manyJapanese lifted from almost insensate productivity to destituition by the shaking earth.It will be hard for poetry to liveup to this shock but we have our"books and our poetry to protect us" Simon and Garfunkel once said,but don't forget generosity toassuage the human suffering thatis ongoing and on its way